Dropping like a stone.

May 5, 2013

“[A]ny degree of ‘flexibility’ about torture
at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone — the rare exception
fast becoming the rule.”-Charles C.
Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, former commandant of the Marine Corps and
former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, respectively.

The Constitution Project's Task
Force on Detainee Treatment recently issued its report. Charged with
"providing the American people with a broad understanding of what is known
— and what may still be unknown — about the past and current treatment of
suspected terrorists detained by the U.S. government," the Task Force
conducted a two-year investigation into detainee treatment under the most
recent presidential administrations. In her preface to the report, Constitution
Project president Virginia E. Sloan issues a bold statement: "We believe
it is the most comprehensive record of detainee treatment across multiple
administrations and multiple geographic theatres yet published." The claim
is all the more extraordinary given that the Task Force is a nongovernmental
body working with no legal authority, no subpoena power, and no obligation on
the part of the government to provide access to classified information. In
addition to analyzing vast amounts of information already made public, the Task
Force conducted dozens of interviews, noting in its report that with the
passage of time many people have become more willing to speak candidly about
their experiences.

The eleven members of the bipartisan Task Force were drawn from high-ranking
former officials in the judiciary, Congress, the State Department, law
enforcement and the military, as well as a few respected experts in law,
medicine and ethics. Its website
states that the Task Force includes "conservatives and liberals,
Republicans and Democrats" — yet one would be hard-pressed to find a
single lefty in the bunch. The Republican co-chair, Asa Hutchinson, was a Bush
appointee to DEA Administrator (2001-2003) and then to the Department of
Homeland Security (2003 to 2005), where he was responsible for thousands of
federal employees in the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA),
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the Federal Law Enforcement
Training Center (%#&@!). It doesn't get any more right-wing-law-&-order
than that. Hutchinson's Democratic counterpart, co-chair James R. Jones, served
under Clinton as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, successfully steering the passage
and implementation of NAFTA and overseeing new initiatives in the War on Drugs;
previously he was Chairman and CEO of the American Stock Exchange (1989-1993). It
doesn't get any more right-wing capitalist than that. If the word liberal
is to have any meaning in our current political discourse, Drug Warriors and
Free Marketeers do not get to claim it just because they slapped a
"D" after their names. Thomas Pickering, Special Assistant to former
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, merits an equally withering assessment.

Another member is Dr. Azizah Y. al-Hibri, a professor emerita of law and the
founder and chair of KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights.
Dr. al-Hibri is an impressively accomplished person, but it is difficult —
to put it mildly — to reconcile Islam with human rights, much less with
leftism.

Then there is Dr. David P. Gushee, a professor of "Christian
Ethics" at some faith-based operation in the State of Georgia called Mercer University. Without knowing
exactly which Christian ethics Dr. Gushee espouses — executing gay
people? murdering
women's healthcare providers? worldwide
pedophilia coverups? — it is nigh impossible to ascertain what his
political views might be. Regardless, I remain warily suspicious of theologians,
mainly because for the life of me I have never been able to figure out what it
is that they do. As best as I can determine, the word
"theology" comes from the Greek logos, meaning knowledge,
and theos meaning imaginary beings. I cannot imagine how this
knowledge might apply to detainee treatment, but for all we know Dr. Gushee was
appointed to the Task Force merely to serve as a cautionary tale.

Still, it can be considered a strength more than a weakness that the Task
Force comprises people with whom lefties would generally disagree, for it is
the centrist and conservative makeup of the Task Force that renders its two
primary findings all the more remarkable — and believable:

Finding #1: U.S. forces, in many instances, used
interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American
personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved
“cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment. Both categories of actions violate
U.S. laws and international treaties. Such conduct was directly counter to
values of the Constitution and our nation.

...

Finding #2: The nation’s most senior officials,
through some of their actions and failures to act in the months and years
immediately following the September 11 attacks, bear ultimate responsibility
for allowing and contributing to the spread of illegal and improper
interrogation techniques used by some U.S. personnel on detainees in several
theaters. Responsibility also falls on other government officials and certain
military leaders.

The report details a litany of revolting abuses, including the barbaric
deaths of detainees in U.S. custody, and much of it will be familiar to those
who have followed reports on detainee abuse since 2001. Nor will anyone likely
be surprised at the actions of the Bush Administration, whose contributions to
the U.S. torture regime range from blundering incompetence (e.g. Bush) to glib
indifference (Rumsfeld) to enthusiastic sadism (Cheney). After conspiring to
engineer a dubious legal loophole for CIA interrogators to escape the grasp of
the Geneva Conventions and rewriting the Army Field Manual's section on
detainee treatment to render it deliberately vague, the administration's
subsequent lack of consistent guidance or indeed any meaningful
oversight made the worldwide horror show that followed virtually inevitable. But
where the report particularly excels is in tracing the pernicious ways that
systematic detainee abuse — originally sanctioned only for CIA interrogations
and only for a few high-level Al-Qaeda operatives — went viral.

John Sifton of Human Rights Watch is quoted with respect to detainee abuse
in Iraq:

There’s been
spontaneous abuse at the troops’ level; there’s been more authorized abuse;
there’s been overlap — a sort of combination of authorized and unauthorized.
And you have abuse that passed around like a virus; abuse that started because
one unit was approved to use it, and then another unit which wasn’t started
copying them.

There were, of course, many who raised objections, even very early on. Such
concerns fell on deaf ears, or worse: in Iraq, a senior intelligence officer
interceded to stop the brutal interrogation of a detainee by Army Rangers. Another
Ranger heard that he was “coddling terrorists," and responded by
sharpening a knife in his presence and warning him not to sleep too soundly. In
a statement to the Navy’s inspector general, Alberto Mora, the Navy’s general
counsel, recounted concerns with "force drift," which NCIS chief
psychologist Michael Gelles had voiced with alarm:

[Gelles]
believed that commanders [at Guantánamo] took no account of the dangerous
phenomenon of “force drift.” Any force utilized to extract information would
continue to escalate, he said. If a person being forced to stand for hours
decided to lie down, it probably would take force to get him to stand up again
and stay standing. ... [T]he level of force applied against an uncooperative
witness tends to escalate such that, if left unchecked, force levels, to
include torture, could be reached.

It seems the Bush administration did excel at one thing: dismissing anything
that contradicted what they wanted to hear. (See, e.g., WMD in Iraq, response
to Hurricane Katrina, global warming denial, abstinence-only sex education,
etc.)

It is chilling to ponder how easily abusive practices spread, becoming
"standard operating procedure" very, very quickly. In light of this,
it is also chilling to consider the militarization of domestic police forces,
the disappearing boundary between law enforcement
and the CIA, and the undercover monitoring of liberal groups
— particularly in the wake of the police brutality we witnessed against
peaceful Occupy protesters, and their
designation as "terrorists."

The most disturbing statement in the report may be the Task Force's third
conclusion:

Finding #3: There is no firm or persuasive evidence
that the widespread use of harsh interrogation techniques by U.S. forces
produced significant information of value. There is substantial evidence that
much of the information adduced from the use of such techniques was not useful
or reliable.